Athletics in the UK: The Rise and Fall of the BAF

36 Courting the women; will they? won‟t they? As I have described, and much to the surprise of the steering group, the McAllister proposals were defeated and this struck a blow at the heart of its work. The Women’s AAA had become wedded to the idea that, within the management of the BAF, a strong English voice was essential and that there would be no direct representation of the English areas. McAllister had proposed an outright majority for England on the managing council but this had been rejected in favour of English regional representation without overall English control. This could become a deal breaking issue with the Women’s AAA walking away from the table and, indeed, a new sub-plot emerged when the Southern Counties, through spokesman Derek Johnson, said that they did not want the Welsh AAA to leave the AAA at all. He could obviously see that, within the corridors of power, the South would be losing a political ally whose votes had often swung a controversial (indeed confrontational) issue in favour of the Southern position. As the BAF project ground onwards the AAA-Women’s AAA steering committee was re-convened to review its report in the light of developments. Bill Evans, once again leading the BAF negotiations, was invited to debate the thorny issue of English v Area representation but was unable to persuade the Women’s AAA to change its stance. The negotiations towards an agreed basis for the BAF would drag on for another two years and, under the chairmanship of John De’Ath, the Women’s AAA gradually came to accept that the amalgamation of the AAA and WAAA was a desirable objective in its own right and that English representation on the BAF Council was a separate matter. The Women’s AAA focused more and more on the detail of the arrangements for the merged association and, perhaps wearily, accepted the inevitability of a BAF based on English regions.